After more than a
century of heavy use, the 1890 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map
of Baltimore, Vol.1 is looking worse for wear.

The huge book's quarter-leather binding is flaking and
peeling and its front board has broken free from its
binding. Gingerly lift the cover away and discover even
more decay. Many of the pages are dark with dust and
spotted with mildew. Rats have nibbled on the edges of the
paper, leaving it torn and ragged, and there's a serious
mold infestation deep inside the book. Generations of
historians, architects, and urban planners have used this
collection of maps to understand what the streets of
Baltimore once looked like, who lived and worked where, and
how the city has changed. Now it's virtually unusable.

It's been over a year since Hopkins rare books curator John
Buchtel became worried about the condition of the Sanborn
atlas and sent it from its home in the Rare Book Room at
the George Peabody Library to the
Sheridan Libraries
Preservation Department at Homewood for an assessment. Was
the mold active, he wanted to know. Could this book be
saved? And how much might it cost?

He's still waiting for answers.

One of the first academic library preservation departments
in the country, the Hopkins unit is known for its expertise
and skill in restoring and conserving books. Founded in
1974 by renowned master bookbinder John Dean, the
department has trained more than 500 conservators while
helping care for many of the Sheridan Libraries' 3 million
volumes. Yet because of budget cuts, shifting
responsibilities, and staffing shortages, no one in
preservation has had time to look at the Sanborn book, much
less start work on it. The three-person conservation staff
is far too busy repairing circulating books from the
General Collection to focus on Special Collections
materials. And so the decaying book has sat on a cluttered
worktable in the basement of Krieger Hall for months.

Standing before the open Sanborn one recent afternoon,
Director of Preservation Sonia Jordan-Mowery gently runs her
index finger along the jagged edges of a page detailing
what kinds of buildings once stood downtown.

"This is local history," she says. "If we don't preserve
it, who will?"

We've all heard predictions of the paperless office
and the bookless library, of the digital revolution that
would make every image and every bit of text we desire
available to us via computer keyboard.

The search engine Google made headlines last year when it
announced that it would cooperate with Harvard and Stanford
universities, the universities of Michigan and Oxford, and
the New York Public Library to scan millions of books from
their collections so that users anywhere could search them.
And academic libraries at places like the University of
Texas in Austin and the University of Southern California
are capturing attention for their decision to move books
from their main libraries in order to refocus the library
into an "information commons" — complete with
computers, communal work areas, and a stable of circulating
laptops.

Although the libraries at Hopkins have devoted significant
time and resources to digitizing certain types of books,
manuscripts, and journals in their collections, the books
themselves have not gone away. And they won't disappear
anytime soon, says Winston Tabb, dean of libraries.
"There's a huge fallacy afoot that digital will take the
place of books," Tabb says. "The number of books being
published every year is going up. Print is always going to
be here.

"Part of what libraries have to do is preserve things as
they are actually produced," Tabb continues. "This is why
we need to have a preservation department."

However as academic libraries at Hopkins and across the
country have moved to embrace new technologies, traditional
paper preservation efforts have been overlooked, says
Deanna B. Marcum, associate librarian of Congress for
librarian services at the Library of Congress. "I'm afraid
that because digital is new and requires so many resources
we are leaving out or just dropping some of the
responsibilities we have to the paper world," she says. "A
lot of organizations have just said, we'll focus on
digital now and we'll get back to the paper when we
can."

During the Hopkins Preservation Department's zenith in the
1980s, there were 11 full-time staff members, eight of whom
were trained conservators. Dean had modeled the department
on the City and Guilds of the London Institute, blended
old-world bookmaking techniques with new technology, and
established an apprenticeship and internship program that
drew conservators from all over the country. They
specialized in high-end restoration and preservation of
special collections books and manuscripts. "The program was
a success from the moment of its creation," says
Jordan-Mowery, who studied preservation here as an intern in
the 1980s. "It couldn't help but succeed because there was
nothing like it in the United States."

"People assumed digital was a way to preserve books,
instead of a way to reformat content for surrogacy and
access," says Jordan-Mowery.

But Dean left Hopkins for Cornell University in the
mid-1980s. In 1991, Hopkins reorganized the preservation
department, cut its work space in half, and reduced the
staff to seven people, with just three conservators. And
the department's focus shifted away from Special
Collections — the library's non-circulating
collection of rare books, photographs, manuscripts, and
sheet music that often needed costly labor intensive
repairs — to the circulating materials in General
Collections. Jordan-Mowery explains the thinking this way:
"There was a cost savings in spending less time on more
books."

It wasn't just about money. It was about the library of the
future. At the time, library administrators at Hopkins and
elsewhere believed that digitization would make Special
Collections materials more accessible to researchers while
helping to limit the use of the original materials and
therefore preserve them. This didn't actually turn out to
be true. "People misunderstood the limits of digital as a
form of preservation," says Jordan-Mowery. "People assumed
digital was a way to preserve books, instead of a way to
reformat content for surrogacy and access."

Today, almost all of the preservation work at Johns
Hopkins' Sheridan Libraries is focused on repairing and
preserving books that circulate as part of the General
Collection (see
"Recase, Reback,
Fan Glue . . . ,").
But the time may have come for the pendulum to swing back,
at least a bit, says Jordan-Mowery, since advances in the
digital age have not reduced use of Special Collections
materials. "There needs to be a renewed assessment," she
says, "of whether or not [the emphasis on General
Collections] is still relevant today."

A gentle bath: Jordan-Mowery washes documents from the
Baltimore Iron Works Company, ca. 1730, then lays them to
dry.

Faculty member Stephen G. Nichols is one person who'd like
to see renewed attention toward preserving materials in
Special Collections. Nichols, the chairman of the
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hopkins,
served as interim director of the Hopkins library in the
1990s. In 2001 he chaired a Council on Library and
Information Resources task force that looked at
preservation needs of artifacts in library collections.

"To have a library without an active preservation
department is like buying a Rolls Royce and never taking it
to be serviced," says Nichols. "For some reason, people
think books don't need to be serviced, but that is just not
the case."

Nichols and other scholars note that the book — the
whole book, the book as object — offers information
beyond its actual contents.

"There's nothing like the real thing," says Phyllis Berger,
who took her Introductory Photography students to Special
Collections to inspire them in their assignment to make
handmade books. She showed them examples of the many
different forms a book can take, including a 16th-century
emblem book and artists' books by Robert Motherwell and
Hanne Darboven. "You cannot experience the tactile quality
of the materials over the 'Net, nor can you really get a
feeling for size," she says.

And there's something about the very act of looking at a
book that's reflective, says Sanjay Arwade, a Hopkins
assistant professor of civil engineering. Arwade recently
took students from his Perspectives on the Evolutions of
Structures class to Special Collections to look at an early
edition of De Architectura by Vitruvius. The class also
examined two large volumes on the Eads Bridge in St. Louis
and the Firth of Forth Bridge in Scotland. "I wanted the
students to see original period photographs and drawings of
the structures, and to read firsthand descriptions of how
the structures were designed and built, and how they were
viewed at the time of construction," he explains.

Martha Edgerton hangs sections of a book from an 1890s sewing
frame (right), to prepare for sewing them into a text block that
she later trims (below), using a plough and press
machine.

"The experience of sitting in a quiet room and reading a
book or examining a drawing or photograph is very different
from looking at a computer screen," he says. "I think
students can focus better when at a table with a book on
it."

The preservation lab in the Krieger basement is
filled with cubbyholes stocked with sheets of bookcloth and
stuffed with aged, interesting-looking machinery used for
all sorts of book and paper repair. There are paper cutters
and encapsulation machines the size of treadmills, black
and green iron book presses that look like medieval torture
devices, and plough and press machines crafted from wood
that's dark and satiny with age.

Martha Edgerton knows every strange-looking machine, every
tiny instrument, and she knows how to use them to repair
old and damaged books. In her 31 years as a book
conservator at Hopkins (she was the first graduate of the
department's apprentice program), she has perfected the art
of book preservation and conservation.

To illustrate the time and effort required to preserve even
a single book, she offers up the example of the Sanborn
atlas.

Edgerton estimates that it might take her an entire year
just to dry clean surface soil from the pages of the book.
Then she would test the paper's acid content to see if it
needed a deacidification treatment to stop it from becoming
flaky and brittle, and she would test the pigment in the
ink to see if it could withstand a water treatment. After
this, Edgerton would remove the text block — the
block of sewn signatures or sets of pages — from the
binding, separate them, and wash them in plain water.

"The stains from the mold problem would fade from washing,"
she explains. After washing, she might brush sizing on the
back and front of each page to add some stiffness back into
the freshly washed paper. "We are always testing and
retesting to see what the paper needs," she says.

After sizing the pages, she'd repair holes and shredded
edges in the paper with pieces of Japanese tissue applied
with special glue. "Then I can start sewing," she says. She
would attach newly repaired sections of the book on an
antique wooden frame and, using archival linen thread that
she's threaded onto a bookbinding needle, she would sew the
pages back into a text block. From there, she would attach
new endsheets and boards, repair the binding, and reinsert
the pages. Or she might craft an entirely new binding and
hand-tool it with gilt.

Working full time on the Sanborn map book and nothing else,
she estimates the whole project might take her two years to
complete. The project isn't likely to happen anytime soon,
however. Because of budget cuts, Edgerton now functions as
the administrator of the conservation unit — managing
students, ordering supplies, coordinating library exhibits
— leaving her little opportunity to do preservation
work.

Weighing the needs of the books against the cost of
preserving them is a constant challenge. "All preservation
has to be balanced in terms of use," says Jordan-Mowery.
"Just because you can fix something doesn't mean that you
should."

Brass lettering tools, warming on a heating stove (right), are
used for hand lettering a title on the spine of a
book.

Replacing a damaged book might be a better alternative than
spending years and thousands of dollars repairing it. Or
perhaps encapsulating a little-used damaged book in mylar
could be the best way to preserve it until it's needed by a
user.

Tabb, who took over as library dean in 2002 after
previously serving as associate librarian at the Library of
Congress, says he's committed to strengthening the
Preservation Department at the Sheridan Libraries and
making preservation a more integrated part of the
university.

Soon after Tabb's arrival, he hired Jordan-Mowery to fill
the job of preservation director — a position that
had been vacant for five years. She is now meeting with
members of the library's collections management team to
identify "pockets of excellence" in the MSEL's collections
and to address their preservation needs. "It's not that
items from the circulating collections shouldn't be
repaired, because they should," she says. But outsourcing
quick repairs could free up conservators to work on more
labor-intensive jobs within Special Collections."We want to
target our efforts on the materials that are of the most
value to our users."

There are 300,000 volumes in the George Peabody
Library, a cathedral of books that houses a myriad of rare
and valuable treasures. There are old books, such as a 1470
copy of De Morali Lepra by medieval German theologian
Johannes Nider. There are rare books, like a copy of the
first American edition of Charles Dickens' Bleak
House. And
there are extraordinary books, like William Hogarth's 1793
The Analysis of Beauty, which features foldouts of
elaborate copperplate engravings that humorously show the
reader what the artist defines as beautiful.

Lena Warren shapes a text block using a hammer and a plough
and press.

Rare books — those considered so because of their
age, edition, scarcity, and value — are housed in
their own Rare Book Room at the library. But there are
thousands of other special books just sitting in the
Peabody stacks.

John Buchtel stops before a shelf in a second floor stack
of the library and surveys a six-foot-high bookcase
containing about 125 volumes. He sees cracked and peeling
bindings and books tied with linen tape. He speculates that
some 25 percent of the books in this library need some form
of conservation repair.

And he's worried about the message the sight of these
decaying books sends to students and scholars. "I'm
concerned that if I walk them through the stacks and they
see these kinds of problems, it's disheartening — it
gives the impression that the library doesn't care about
its materials. That's not true."

Caring for these books ensures that the materials will be
available for years to come, Buchtel says. "We have a
responsibility not to deprive the future of its past."

Doing nothing is not an option, Jordan-Mowery says. Nor is
continuing to overlook the books that need help. "The books
are deteriorating — we need to be responsive to
them," she says. "So much of preservation is timing. We
don't have forever to get to everything."